The Writing Life – Always Living in the Future

I thought I’d take a moment today to reflect on some of the oddities of living life as a writer. It was sort of brought home to me yesterday when everyone seemed to be sending me messages about my newest release, WOLF HILLS, and my mind was firmly in an altogether different universe. See, I’ve been invited to write a short story for the upcoming Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance. I’ve been working on that story, set in my jit’suku universe, in the far future when space travel is commonplace and humanity is at war with the alien jit’suku empire. Neat, huh?

Only, people kept wanting to talk about werewolves. And to be clear, I’m FINE with that. Only thing is, I finished writing WOLF HILLS over a year ago and edits were completed late last year. To me, it’s old news and my little brain has moved on to something else.

I believe it is the curse of the writer to always be a step ahead of the beat. I have to sort of slow myself down and switch gears to go back and think about the world of WOLF HILLS – which I intend to revisit to write another book after these other commitments are met.

In the year since I finished writing WOLF HILLS, I’ve self-published two space opera novellas, KING OF SWORDS and KING OF CUPS, I wrote a werewolf short story (THE PURRFECT STRANGER) set in my Tales of the Were series for AllRomanceEbooks.com, and I’ve completed a new, very long (94,000 word) Dragon Knights, high fantasy dragon shifter novel, which is currently being contracted. I’ve also worked on various other projects set in various other worlds. Suffice to say, my brain has been taken in many different directions since completing work on WOLF HILLS.

And in a way, I can’t wait to get back to the world of WOLF HILLS. I have plans for the next book. In fact, I’ve already started it, though it will be some time before I can get back to that project. After I finish this short story, I need to finish Harry’s book – officially titled HARRY’S SACRIFICE in my Resonance Mates series. That’s going to be a hard one to finish because it will end the original 5 book story arc I’d planned all those years ago when I first started writing the series. I hope to do a spinoff trilogy in the future, but as you can probably see… my time is spoken for in many different (and exciting!) ways.

I think most writers – at least those of us who write more than 1 book a year – are in the same predicament. We have all these worlds and characters swimming around in our heads all the time. Sometimes it’s hard to come back down to Planet Earth and live in the current book instead of the books yet to come.

Thanks to those of you who’ve reached out to me about WOLF HILLS. You brought me back to Earth for a few precious moments so that I can enjoy the fruit of my labors a bit before going off to labor again. 🙂